Each year, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory helps celebrate American Archive Month by releasing a collection of images using X-ray data that have been stored in its archive.

The Chandra Data Archive is a sophisticated digital system that ultimately contains all of the data obtained by the telescope since its launch into space in 1999. Chandra's archive is a resource that makes these data available to the scientific community and the general public for years after they were originally obtained.

Each of these six new images also includes data from telescopes covering other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as visible and infrared light. This collection of images represents just a small fraction of the treasures that reside in Chandra's unique X-ray archive.
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Gamma-ray bursts are some of the most powerful explosions in the Universe. As their name implies, these events produce spectacular outbursts in gamma rays and often in other types of light over time such as X-rays and optical light. By studying the details of these different types of light, astronomers try to piece together exactly what is going on with these cosmic blasts.

On September 3, 2014, instruments aboard the Swift telescope picked up a gamma-ray burst, which was dubbed GRB 140903A. About three weeks later, a team of researchers used Chandra to study the afterglow of the event in X-rays.

By combining the Chandra observations with optical data from ground-based telescopes, astronomers have determined that GRB 140903A was the merger of two neutron stars in a galaxy about 3.9 billion light years from Earth. In addition, they found evidence that the gamma-ray burst produced pencil-thin beams of radiation. Astronomers were only able to detect this event because the jets generated by the blast were pointed toward Earth.

What does this mean? The implication is that if some or all mergers like this produce these narrow beams, then astronomers may be missing a vast majority of them because they do not fall along our line of sight. This is interesting to many scientists who study these kinds of events. And since neutron star mergers are thought to be sources of gravitational waves, scientists using LIGO and other future observatories will need to know this information in order to hone their searches.
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We frequently ask: how far away is that? The concept of distance is very familiar to us. After all, we need to factor in distance whether it's for a trip around the corner or across the country. One way to define distance is the ground covered between two points.

Distance plays an important role in many Olympic sports. The ability to travel the distance around a track, across a swimming pool, or down the road faster than anyone else may lead to a gold medal. Olympic events like the marathon show how some athletes can excel over what most of us consider to be a very long distance.

Despite how large some Olympic distances may seem, they are just a tiny fraction of the lengths we see across space. For comparison purposes, let's look at everything in the widely accepted unit of meters. In the metric system, a kilometer simply means a thousand meters (which is equivalent to about 0.62 miles). The longest Olympic track and field event in terms of distance is the 50-kilometer, or 50,000-meter, race walk.

By comparison, it is about 7700 kilometers, or 7.7 million meters, from New York to Rio de Janeiro for those athletes and spectators making that trip. The distance around the equator of Earth is about 40 million meters. In space, however, distances get much, much bigger. It's about 150 billion meters to the Sun, and 40 quadrillion meters to Proxima Centauri, the next nearest star to us. That's a 40 followed by another 15 zeroes.

Because numbers get so large so quickly when talking about objects in space, astronomers most often use the unit of light years to describe distance. While it sounds like an amount of time, a light year is, in fact, a distance. It is equivalent to how far light travels over the course of one year, roughly 9,000 trillion meters. Rather than keeping track of all of those zeroes, we can measure that same distance to Proxima Centauri as being about 4.2 light years away. That's helpful because Proxima Centauri is actually very close to us, compared to many other things in space. For example, the center of the Milky Way galaxy is about 26,000 light years away. And astronomers have observed light left over from the Big Bang at some 13.7 billion light years away.

So whether it is around a track or across a galaxy, distance is something worth keeping in perspective.
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The concept of speed is infused into our lives, whether it is as we run, drive a car, or travel across the globe. Of course, the athletes in the Olympic Games are often the fastest in the world. This is apparent in many of the Olympic sports from track and field to cycling to downhill skiing and speed skating.

While we are used to asking, 'who is faster,' it's important to understand just what speed represents. Speed is defined as a distance traveled over a certain period of time. In science, we would write this as the equation "speed equals distance divided by time." We've become rather used to this equation - even if we don't realize it. Using this equation, for example, cars provide speed in miles or kilometers per hour. This gives the number of miles or kilometers that would be covered if you moved at that speed for one hour.

The international standard unit for speed is different. The distance is measured in meters, while the amount of time considered is one second. By converting speeds from common experiences into meters per second, we can use this as a reference point for exploring the enormous range of speeds around the world and across the Universe.

For example, a car moving at 20 miles per hour (or 32 kilometers per hour) is going the equivalent speed of about 9 meters per second. An Olympic athlete, however, can move even faster. Usain Bolt has been clocked running at 12.4 meters per second in the 100-meter sprint. And over a dozen cyclists at the velodrome at the 2012 London Games reached top speeds of over 20 meters per second.

These are incredibly impressive feats of speed in the arena of athletic competitions. They also make the speeds found elsewhere even more amazing. For example, the speed of sound in the Earth's atmosphere is about 340 meters per second. Meanwhile, the International Space Station orbits the Earth at about 7,600 meters per second, and the Earth travels around the Sun at some 30,000 meters per second.

Those blistering paces pale in comparison, however, to the Universe's real speedsters. Take, for example, the pulsar known as IGR J11014-6103. This dense core was created when a star collapsed, hurtling this object into space. Astronomers have calculated that this stellar nub is blazing away from its birthplace at a whopping one to two million meters per second. Now that's a speed that anyone -- Olympic athlete or otherwise -- might have to marvel at.
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When something turns around an axis, we call this rotation. We see rotation all around us - a merry-go- round on a playground, a vinyl record on a turntable, even a washing machine that cleans our clothes. It can often be important - and interesting - to determine just how fast something spins. We call this rotational speed and it is measured as the number of rotations over a certain period of time.

In the Olympic Games, athletes often need to rotate in order to compete in their sports. Gymnasts rotate their bodies during routines, ice skaters rotate during their spins, and aerial skiers perform rotations high in the air. How do the spinning accomplishments of these amazing athletes compare to other rotating things that we know about?

Ferris wheels rotate about relatively slowly making one revolution every 600 seconds or so. A ceiling fan, on the other hand, typically rotates twice around every second. This translates into a rotational speed of 0.5 Hertz, the unit we use to talk about rotation. (Hertz=# of rotations per second). That is very quick, but a gymnast doing a back flip rotates with a speed of 1.5 Hertz, while an ice skater can spin with a rotational speed of 50 Hertz.

We also find things in space that rotate. For example, all of the planets, including Earth, rotate around an axis as they make their orbit around the Sun. This rotation, which happens once every 24 hours on Earth, gives us our day and night. The Sun also spins, making one rotation about every 25 days. Elsewhere in space, astronomers have found objects that rotate at a dizzying speed. For example, the dense cores left behind after stars explode - known as neutron stars - can rotate at remarkable rates. The neutron star at the center of the Crab Nebula is moving at 30 Hertz, in other words making 30 rotations in just one second. That's almost as fast as Olympic ice skaters, which is amazing especially when you consider that the neutron star is over 10 miles or 16 kilometers across!

Perhaps the next time you watch a gymnast tumble or a skier do a flip, think of the other examples in our lives and across space where rotation is taking place.
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6. The AstrOlympics Project: What Do Olympic Athletes and Objects in Space have in Common?Quicktime

The athletes that compete in the Olympics can do amazing things. They run faster, jump higher, and spin quicker than most of us ever will.

Many of us are also in awe of what the Universe has to offer. Astronomers have explored the heavens with their telescopes and come up with findings that are so fantastic it can be hard to believe they're real.

What do Olympic athletes and objects in space have in common? The answer is matter in motion, often in extreme examples. Whether it is a human body moving at the fastest speeds possible or the debris from an exploded star blasting through space, the physics of that motion is, in many ways, the same.

The AstrOlympics project explores the spectacular range of science that we can find both in the impressive feats of the Olympic Games as well as in cosmic phenomena throughout the Universe. By measuring the range of values for such things as speed, mass, time, pressure, rotation, distance, and more, we can learn not only about the world around us, but also about the Universe we all live in.

The Olympics are an opportunity to behold the limits of human abilities in athletics. After all, the Olympic motto is Latin for "faster, higher, stronger." AstrOlympics enables us to appreciate the feats of the Olympic athletes and then venture far beyond into the outer reaches of space.

For many kids (and those of us who are still kids at heart), bubbles are a lot of fun. We see bubbles blown out of soapy wands and others that float from the bottom of a fizzy drink to the top. But bubbles also represent important physical phenomena that can be found across many scales and in many different types of objects.

Let's look first at the soap bubble. Soap bubbles are formed when someone injects breath or air into a film of soapy water. This fits in with the definition of a bubble being a sphere enclosing liquid or gas. We can also find bubbles in space, where they are not made of soap like those here on Earth. Rather cosmic bubbles are blown out of the material we find in between stars and galaxies. Take, for example, this object. Its formal astronomical name is NGC 7635, but astronomers have nicknamed it the "Bubble Nebula." And it's easy to see why when you look at it. The bubble in the Bubble Nebula is being blown up by a massive star that sits in its center. This star has powerful winds that are driven off of its surface, pushing the gas and dust that surround the star outward. The Bubble Nebula is much bigger than any soap bubble you will find on Earth. It stretches across over 63 trillion miles in diameter.

Even bigger still are the bubbles that astronomers find carved out in galaxy clusters. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity. In addition to the hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies that make up these gigantic objects, enormous amounts of hot gas envelope galaxy clusters. By using X-ray telescopes like Chandra, astronomers can examine this superheated gas. In objects like the galaxy cluster called MS0735.6+7421, they find that enormous bubbles spanning over seven times the size of the entire Milky Way galaxy have been formed in the hot gas. What could blow up such an enormous bubble? The answer is a supermassive black hole, weighing nearly a billion times the mass of the Sun, that lies at the center of the cluster. This black hole is shooting out powerful jets that push the 50-million-degree hot gas outward and create these incredible bubbles.

So the next time you pick up a bottle of bubbles, you may want to take a moment to realize how far-reaching bubbles truly are. You might only be able to inflate a bubble the size of a few inches, but elsewhere in the Universe, bubbles are forming in places and in sizes that are almost impossible to imagine.
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One of the most interesting characteristics of light is that the path that it travels can bend. This happens when light is moving through one medium like air, and then enters another medium like glass or water. We experience this all of the time here on Earth. Whenever we put eyeglasses on or insert contact lenses, we are taking advantage of the fact that we can bend the path of light so it can properly focus onto the retinas of our eyes. We also see examples of bent light in the slightly oval appearance of the setting Sun or when we think we see water on in the distance on a hot highway.

Light being bent is also very important when we want to learn about things in space. In fact, some of the most exciting discoveries made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes involve light that has been bent. Take, for example, the Bullet Cluster. This system contains two galaxy clusters that have rammed into one another at tremendous speeds. The collision was so violent that normal matter has been wrenched away from dark matter. While we can't see the dark matter directly, we can learn where it is by light being lensed.

How does this work? When the light from very distant galaxies passes through a massive cluster of galaxies, like in the Bullet Cluster, the cluster can bend the path of the galaxy's light, in essence acting like a lens. From the vantage point of our telescopes, the distant galaxies appear distorted or elongated. Astronomers can use this information to build maps about where the dark matter is, which tells them more about this mysterious substance.

The ultimate light benders in the Universe are black holes, which can bend light rays into a closed loop so they never escape the black hole. Chandra has observed many black holes and their environments over the course of the mission. Whether they are the smaller black holes that are produced by the collapse of a giant star or the enormous supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, Chandra will continue to observe these objects that bend light in amazing ways across the Universe.

Light comes in different forms. The light that we see with our eyes is just a fraction of all light. Light also encompasses wavelengths ranging from radio waves to gamma rays.

Nothing in the Universe can travel faster than light. In a vacuum, light travels at over 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) per second. This means light could circle the Earth 7.5 times in one second.

As light travels, its path can be bent when it goes from one medium to another (such as air to water). It can also be blocked (when a shadow occurs, for example), reflected (as with a mirror), or absorbed (like when a stone is heated by infrared light (waves) from the Sun.)

Humans have learned how to harness light and employ it in technologies ranging from medical devices (MRI/laser) to cell phones to giant telescopes.
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